FFF

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Join us Sunday August 4th on the first floor of The Mill for an Artist Talk about Scenario with Corina Reynolds at The Wassaic Project

Scenario on view at The Wassaic Project every weekend June 4 - September 2, 2013

Scenario, an immersive in installation by artist Corina Reynolds, uses the surface language of corporate office culture to explore the themes of white noise and balance. Upon entering Scenario, the visitor is confronted first by an air of chilling calmness and then the overwhelming scent of Sea Breeze Fresh. Through its crisp pungency, the room achieves stasis as if the space has been removed from a bustling New York high rise and plunked into the rustic exhibition space of the Wassaic Project's Mill. The right angles of its white walls and acoustical drop ceiling hold the visitor at the threshold while the bright, beckoning column of fluorescent lights draws them in with tractor beam intensity to the minimalist cubicle at the rear of the installation. It is here that the claustrophobic nature of the space comes to its pinnacle as the visitor takes in the oppressive sound of white noise emitted by the Dohme office unite nestled in the cubicles corner in opposition to the spaces one fanciful escape—a simulation of a 6ft ficus.

Homeward Found, the Wassaic Project’s sixth annual summer exhibition, refers to a passage, a personal quest, and a seeking of home. The Wassaic Project invites viewers to climb the seven stories of the Maxon Mills grain elevator once again and explore the work of over eighty emerging artists, half of whom are Wassaic Artist Residency alumni. Homeward Found speaks to the domestic themes present throughout the exhibition, as well as the scavenged materials found in many of the works. Jonathan Schipper’s To Dust, brings domestic opulence into the gallery and accelerates the process of decay by mechanically eroding two figurative sculptures. Louie Hinnen’s penthouse kitchen, Cornbread and Buttermilk, and Carmen Osterlye’s floral parlor, Den of Blossomy, bring rooms to life with their immersive installations of internal spaces, creating spaces that are familiar, beautiful yet deeply unsettling. Kevin Cyr’s one person abode, Cabin Tent, deals with themes of shelter, mobility, self-reliance and the instinct to protect from nature, while Markel Uriu’s moss pelt confronts the mythical idea of a journey and shelter within nature. Homeward Found creates a journey for the viewer to reflect on home. The exhibition speaks to the larger sense of comfort and belonging that the Wassaic Project has found over the last six years in the hamlet of Wassaic. - See more at: The Wassaic Project

Thursday, November 29, 2012

BUSINESS SEMINAR - FINAL PERFORMANCE

Final Performance of Business Seminar by Corina Reynolds

As part of Informational Prospects at the Field Library Gallery (4 Nelson Avenue, Peekskill, NY)

In conjunction with Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art's Peekskill Project V, the Field Library Gallery is pleased to bring present Business Seminar, a live performance by contemporary artist Corina Reynolds. This performance reflects the audience's relationship with corporate incentives and community giving in a mirror of shiny smiles and sweet reassurance.

The performance is part of the show Informational Prospects, highlighting new work from artists Ryan Jennings Clark and Corina Reynolds. The thought-provoking installation, electronics, and photography explore our frighteningly dependent relationship on electronic information. The show runs from September 29ththrough December 16th, with a special performance by Corina Reynolds on September 29th and October 14th at 2:30 pm.www.hvcca.org

Thursday, October 18, 2012

"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence with no civilization in between"

- Oscar Wilde

In the mid 19th century, a group of artists known as the Hudson Valley School sought to capture the magnificence of the American frontier at a time when little of it was seen, and even less was known. It was a precursor to the grand experiment of manifest destiny and glorified the pristine, “virgin” land of this young country as much as it disregarded the history of a civilization who had called it home for thousands of years. These painters corralled their efforts under the cloak of Romanticism, attempting to capture the sublimity of natureʼs prowess under godʼs creation. It was a method of interpreting their surroundings with a child-like innocence, with little regard to sense of place and history, let alone the cultures that inhabited it. While these painters demonstrated a high level of craft and their aesthetic is what the majority of the general public think of when they hear the word “art,” their subject matter is arbitrary and generic, offering the viewer mere surface contemplation; nothing more than the saccharine pleasure of an idealized meadow, river, or mountain.

As the Hudson Valley School proffered idyllic visions of a new countryʼs seemingly endless bounty of open space and natural resources, the group of artists and thinkers in this exhibition are grappling with effects of late model capitalism, after the 20th centuryʼs greatest superpower has reached its peak and begins to tumble down the mountain.

Engaging what Gilles Deleuze would refer to as “nomadic thought,” this exhibition interprets the cycle of people who live on, alter, and leave certain sections of land as an amorphous process with constantly changing boundaries of our physical and psychological environments. Their choice of media reflects this mode of thinking, defining their practices with monikers like “exercises in futility,” “video documentation of temporary public installations,” or “mobile-hybrid sculptural systems”. Their works act of a kind of field guide, offering the viewer multiple routes for navigating their physical and cultural surroundings.

Greg Stewartʼs sculptural works and performative “survival suits” are eerie mutations of man and animal, designed for the kind of harmonious chaos that is spawned from migration and adaptation in the areas in between urban and rural environments. For Dan Carlson the residue and monuments of the Cold War, in the form of abandoned military bases and industrial wastelands, serve as fertile ground for cultivating response in the form of video installations. Peter Lapsleyʼs sculptures are composed of industrial materials used in contemporary architecture that nod to the perfect forms of ancient mathematics and the ruins that serve as evidence of their unattainability. Producing both reflective and functional research-based works, Jan Mun focuses on cultural and conceptual, text-based work uses Gertrude Stein's writing in tandem with the Human environmental remediation through community-based interventions, while Rick Reid's conceptual, text-based work uses Gertrude Stein's writing in tandem with the Human Genome Project and Davinci's Divine Proportion to create a new vision of human cartography. Corina Reynolds examines our ritualistic relationship with high-technology and its power to homogenize any foreign space into something immediately accessible and familiar whereas Josh Bricker's videos create a kind of displacement where the commonplace, nationalist pride so embedded in American entertainment turns into and familiar, whereas Josh Bricker's videos create a kind of displacement where the something completely alien.

John Wanzel employs the method of artist as expert, taking a pseudoscientific approach for describing man-made structures in geologic terms, while Leah Raintree's shale drawings distort value systems of natural resources in abstracted, economic terms. Tom Pnini's videos reveal the mechanics of illusions created using water, earth, and light, and play nicely with Chad Curtis' scaled down mountains made from everyday materials. Ben Finer's works on paper hinge the seemingly mundane beauty of natural landscapes with a constructed spirituality, while Daniel Glendening acts as a kind of intermediary historian, culling inspiration from the failed utopian experiments of our recent past and producing artifacts that seem to come from the near future.

Overall, these artists are united through a heightened sense of awareness to their surroundings and modes of understanding their immediate environments through the lens of the American landscape; a landscape that is shaped through the unseen sociopolitical forces that dominate the constant shift of cultural paradigms and the dizzying flux of construction and destruction.

Friday, September 21, 2012

In conjunction with Peekskill Project V: A Citywide Festival of Contemporary Art, organized by Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Field Library Gallery is pleased to bring you two very exciting contemporary artists: Corina Reynolds and Ryan Jennings Clark. This innovative show, Informational Prospects, highlights the artists’ thought-provoking work with installation, electronics, and photography. The show runs from September 29th through December 16th, with a special performance by Corina Reynolds on September 29th at

2:30 pm.

Corina Reynolds is an Interactive Installation/Video artist based in New York City. Exchange forms the central tenets of her studio practice, utilizing concepts from the history of sociology, psychology, and economics. Her immersive installation, performance, and video works invite the viewer to play along and directly experience the hierarchies present in every day society.

Her recent work examines our ritualistic relationship with high-technology and its power to homogenize any foreign space into something immediately accessible and familiar. Within this body of work, economic transactions become metaphors for systematically evaluating interpersonal relationships. For more information visit: www.corinar.com.

Ryan Jennings Clark (Moving Image/Photography) is a visual artist working in New York City. The conceptual influences for his studio practice originate from an interest in the philosophy of time. This broad concept is explored more selectively, through visual metaphor and atmosphere by utilizing video, photography, electronics and installation. His recent work focuses on the exponential rate of change in technologies and the way this affects our long-held cultural conceptions of individuality and progress. He earned an MFA from Cranbrook

Academy of Art where he received the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award in 2011. For more information visit: www.ryanjenningsclark.com.

Please join us at 2pm September 29th at the Field Library Gallery for a performance and reception.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Come see the work of 11 Cranbrook grad students at what may be the Museum of New Art's last official show in this space. Show includes work by Carson Grubaugh, Corina Reynolds, Tony Garbarini, Ashley Kratzke and more. Opening reception is at 6pm November 6th 2010.